Unfortunately according to my American friends' colloquial definition of "success" it is simply $$$.

Yup money. "She became very successful" = "She made lots of money". Sometimes I am a jackass and ask stupid questions, "well what if she is unhappy, is she still successful?". And people look at me like I am from Mars ;-)

I just kind of struck me as strange. I grew up with it meaning something like "lucky", "fortunate", could be things like kid is doing well in school, found the person of their dreams to marry, it wasn't a direct euphemism for got a pile of money. But now it kind of is.

Do I personally agree or disagree? Well don't certainly use the word that way, and unless I am felling snarky I won't bother dissecting its meaning or messing with it.

Mr. Foreman, who stared down financial collapse as an adult despite a troubled, impoverished childhood, said he knew real wealth when he saw it. “If you’re confident, you’re wealthy,” he says. “I’ve seen guys who work on a ship channel and they get to a certain point and they’re confident. You can look in their faces, they’re longshoremen, and they have this confidence about them...I’ve seen a lot of guys with millions and they don’t have any confidence,” he says. “So they’re not wealthy.”

On skim, I do not see any hard definition of the "outstanding success" you envisioned for Nickler. If you never defined it, you cannot achieve it or know if you have. What gets measured gets done but, also, you need a measurable goal to know when you are done.

So I think what you had in your van were easily achieved and easily measured or recognized goals. Things get harder to see when the goal is larger and seems nebulous. You need to make it tangible somehow.

Well put. Over the last few months we've come to a conclusion that we'll measure the product's success through the ability to earn a customer referral (stolen from Ecquire's Paul DeJoe). Prviously, it's been 'get fucking launched', and 'build a UI that doesn't make me want to punch my screen'.

It totally is. What I probably didn't make clear is that our long term approach with Nickler had me doubting what success looked like, the path, and how we defined it. I had to stop making it a tangible thing to keep from going insane.

I think I probably blast this shit out to help manage the voices, and talk my way through it, thanks for reading!

You brag too much in that post and come off as somewhat douchey, but reflective and intelligent. Also, you're one of the better writers that I've read (and I've written professionally) and that's not an easy skill for most to master, so kudos on that.